The Animal Factory

by Bunker, Edward

  “You didn’t need me, carnal. You could bust a foot in all their asses.”

  “Maybe … but sometimes it’s better to be a fox than a lion. You being there cinched the domino that we’d skate without a shitstorm.”

  When they reached the lower yard, Ponchie went off toward where some Chicanos were gathered around a trio with guitars singing rancheros.

  “That guy’s all right,” T.J. said.

  “Solid and game,” Earl said. “But he gets wilder as he gets older. He was cooler when he was twenty-two.”

  “Fuck, they made him a mad dog in these places. Happens all the time.”

  “Sometimes you’re pretty perspicacious, old country boy.”

  “What the hell does ‘pers-shit’ mean?”

  * * *

  When they pushed through the gymnasium door and turned right, they saw Paul, Bad Eye, Vito, and Ron being marched down the mezzanine stairs by three guards, the last guard carrying the sack of home brew over his shoulder. Some of the other convicts in the gym stopped to watch the bust. A few scattered catcalls rang out, but they were more for form’s sake than out of real indignation.

  As prisoners and guards crossed the basketball court and headed toward the door, Earl and T.J. had to step aside to let them pass. Paul was first, strolling hip, as if the guards didn’t exist. He shrugged as he passed. Vito was next, still smiling mischievously. He winked. Bad Eye, however, was flushed and glowering. “These assholes say I’m drunk,” he said as he went by. Ron was last, his face grim, but he nodded recognition with the shadow of a smile.

  “That other mess is square,” Earl said to Ron.

  “Don’t talk to ’em, Earl,” the guard with the sack said, a pudgy little sergeant with tufts of booger-encrusted hair coming from his nose. He was notorious for his halitosis and for snitching on other guards. He loathed influential convicts like Earl.

  T.J., who shared a cell with Bad Eye, said, “Well, damn, leastways I can jack off in peace for a few days.”

  “Yeah, they’ll be out in a week. I wonder why they busted Ron. He wasn’t even in there when we split. He wasn’t in the jug.”

  “Man, you’re gettin’ like a father. He can do a week in the hole. What the fuck. It’ll do him good.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” But Earl was thinking of Ron’s court situation, that the judge was going to call him back, and although this was a trivial infraction, it was a bad way to begin. Moreover, the intercession with Psycho Mike seemed to have created responsibility; having helped once, he was obliged for some reason to help again—if he could. If it was only some other fuckin’ sergeant, he thought. He could influence some old-time guards, and others could be influenced by Seeman. But some would take pleasure in thwarting him, and would like to lock him up if they could catch him.

  T.J. had wandered to the weight platform where he got an eyewitness report of the bust. Someone must have snitched because the sergeant and two guards had headed directly for the equipment room. Ron Decker had been sitting at the head of the stairs, and as the guards crossed the gym, he’d gotten up and knocked on the wire. He’d been arrested as the lookout.

  Earl snorted and shook his head. “It was a classy move, but futile. They couldn’t have stashed that much booze in thirty seconds.”

  “He did what he was supposed to. I kind of respect him.”

  “So did the Light Brigade … Aw, fuck, maybe I can do something, not for the fellas. They’re dead.”

  “I oughta hit you in your chest. You’re schemin’ on that boy … an’ you’re goin’ to a lot of trouble. We can just rip him off. He sho’ nuff is purty. I wouldn’t mind … ummmph.”

  “Now, boy, you ain’t gonna do that,” Earl said, but his tone erased any order from his words. T.J. loved Earl, would do anything for him, including murder, but to be ordered by anyone to do or not to do something was an automatic cause for rebellion. Earl was the same way, but the years had smoothed his rough edges; he could usually hide his feelings from the guards, and his friends didn’t give orders. All of them had the same view of authority.

  “So what’re you gonna do, suck his prick?”

  “He couldn’t come anything but honey, pretty as he is.”

  “You’ve got enough time in where you’ve got a license.”

  “It’s always all right if it’s true love and you don’t get caught and ruin your image.” Earl barely thought of his words; they were part of a standard routine about prison sex. It was a jocular credo that after one year behind walls it was permissible to kiss a kid or a queen. After five years it was okay to jerk them off to “get ’em hot.” After ten years, “making tortillas” or “flip-flopping” was acceptable, and after twenty years anything was fine. So the banter said. It was not a true reflection of the ethos, which condemned anything that didn’t ignore male physiology. It did, however, reflect a general cynicism about roles played in the privacy of a cell. Too many tough guys were caught in flagrante delicto.

  Earl thought about what might be done. Fitz would type the disciplinary reports in the yard office. After the sergeant signed, he or Fitz could steal them back. It was often done on small offenses where the particular guard didn’t check the results of the disciplinary hearing. Sometimes the clerk just “misplaced” them, so if there was an outcry, he could simply take them out of a drawer or discover them lost in other papers on his desk. The flaws here were twofold: This sergeant would check to see what had happened, and all four men were in segregation.

  Maybe Seeman could talk the sergeant into quashing the report? No, the sergeant was under Lieutenant Hodges’s supervision.

  “What we need is a postponement,” Earl said; then noticed that T.J. was gone. Looking around, Earl saw him burying punches into the heavy sandbag. He wore no gloves and his knuckles would soon be raw meat. Nobody would mistake him for Sugar Ray Robinson, but his hands were blurs and the punches devastating.

  When T.J. came back, he asked, “What now?”

  “Got any dope?”

  “Nope, no dope. Some weed, but they want to sell it—to us. That’s insultin’. I’d rather sniff some glue.”

  “You and Paul and Bad Eye.”

  “Let’s go outside and play some handball. I can beat your big ass at that—especially when you’re all puffed up.”

  “You do okay for an ol’ man. But I’ll kick your ass today.”

  “Okay, Muscles, get your glove. Be on the court when I get back.”

  “Where you goin’?”

  “I got an idea to get Ronnie out of—”

  “Ronnie! Sheeit!”

  “Fuck you,” Earl said, grinning as he pushed out of the gym.

  As Earl came around the corner and saw the yard office, he remembered that Big Rand was on vacation for a week. The guard had confided that he was going to Tahoe without his wife to meet a secretary from the outside administration building.

  “I wish the big slob was here,” Earl said to himself. Instead, Joe Pepper, nicknamed Deputy Dog by the convicts, was on duty. Rather, his feet were on the desk, soles worn through. He was all cop in attitude, but not that dangerous because he was lazy and dumb. He thought Earl Copen was a model convict.

  As Earl went inside he saw the bad-breathed sergeant at the desk in the lieutenant’s office, scribbling his report on a yellow tablet. Fitz was typing and didn’t see Earl, who looked over the day clerk’s shoulder and saw he was working on minutes from the last Indian Cultural Club meeting. Earl leaned over and said, “Let’s go check the fishpond.”

  Fitz stayed out of trouble because he didn’t want to jeopardize his chances for parole. He wanted to get out and help his people. But he took vicarious pleasure in Earl’s intrigues. He put the cover on the typewriter and took a slice of dry bread from a drawer. He’d do his daily chore of feeding the fish while they talked.

  The pellets of bread plunked into the water, drawing the goldfish tribe, while Earl told him about his plan, clarifying the last touches in his mind as he talked. When he finish
ed, he asked, “Think it’ll work?”

  Fitz nodded. “Probably. Things could go wrong, but they’d be bad luck. It’s really pretty slick. He’ll check the results, but he’ll never go back and see it’s a different report. If he does, we’re in deep shit. Try and stall the typing so he signs just before he goes off duty. But if you can’t, fuck it. The captain’s clerk will be on the lookout for it.”

  “You leave early,” Earl said. “I’ll come in at three.”

  In “B” Section the guards conducted a perfunctory body search, scarcely watching as the four convicts stripped and went through the ritual dance of showing cranny and orifice. One by one they were put in the first four holding cells on the bottom tier. In Ron’s cell there was a filthy striped mattress on the floor with two blankets in a tangle on top of it. Both the light fixture and the toilet had been torn from the wall, leaving scars of bare concrete around the holes. There was just enough light coming through the bars to be able to see. The top of a gallon can was covered with a magazine—the toilet. The sink was still in place, coated with grime. They must’ve forgotten it, Ron thought. He’d heard that the men in “B” Section had burned and destroyed their cells during the first night of the strike.

  As soon as the guards left, convicts came up to talk to Bad Eye, Vito, and Paul. They were men in segregation who were let out to work. Ron folded the blankets into a pillow and lay down. He could hear voices, snatches of words and frequent laughter. He wondered why he didn’t feel worse. He expected to be terribly depressed, but instead he felt empty. Maybe so much tension for so long sapped the capacity for emotions.

  “Hey, Ronnie,” Bad Eye called.

  For a moment Ron hesitated, disliking the diminutive; then Bad Eye called again and he answered, “Yeah.”

  “Are you all right?” Bad Eye asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  Several convicts walked by the cell, including some blacks with mean expressions. None said a word. In the jail they had usually tried to test him in some way, and even in prison a couple had approached him—and he met them with cold aloofness, seeing that it was really hostility rather than friendship. Now they just glanced in and kept going, and he sensed it was because he’d been arrested with Bad Eye and the others.

  A shirtless convict appeared, his bulky torso a collage of blue tattoos, many drawn as roughly as a first-grader’s picture. He pushed through a stack of magazines with a pack of cigarettes and matches on top. “Here you go, brother.”

  “Where’d these come from?”

  “From the Brotherhood—me. I’m with T.J. and Bad Eye. They call me Tank. How’s Earl?”

  Ron wondered how the man knew that he knew Earl. “He’s okay.”

  “Good dude. Got a lot of sense.” When everything was through the bars, Tank leaned against them and asked for a cigarette. “I didn’t bring any for myself.”

  Tank lit a cigarette and asked how long Ron had been in San Quentin. It was a conversation of introduction, slightly stilted but not uneasy. Then, somehow, Tank was telling his story. He’d escaped from reform school, where he’d been sent for chronic truancy, and stole a car. He was sent to a youth prison where he’d killed a man and been sentenced to death. After a year on Condemned Row, he’d gotten a new trial and pleaded guilty for a life sentence. He was now twenty-five years old, had been in jail for eleven years, the last six in segregation in Folsom and San Quentin. There was a forthright, almost childlike naïveté in his manner. A year ago the casual references to murder would have nonplussed Ron, caused a pang of fear. Now he felt sorry for the young man, who was his own age and both wiser and dumber than he, who knew nothing of life but prison, whose desires concerned prison, whose idea of freedom was to get out on the big yard with his “brothers.” He seemed to include Ron automatically in that circle, and somehow it made Ron feel good.

  “Do you need anything else?” he asked.

  “The mattress is filthy. Are there any sheets?”

  “You’re not supposed to have ’em down here on the bottom floor but I’ll bring some. Put the blanket over ’em. I’ll bring some coffee, too.”

  When Tank left, Ron flopped back on the mattress, feeling happy. He knew it was ridiculous to feel so good in the hole. Yet for the first time since his arrival, he felt accepted. He didn’t yet blend, but he felt stronger; it was good to have friends, to be liked, to belong, to have someone do something as simple as bringing cigarettes and coffee.

  A while later, when the workers were locked up for count, he talked to Paul, who explained that they would go to disciplinary court in the morning and would probably get five days.

  The evening meal was cold, but Ron was hungry and got it down. Then he leafed through the magazines, mostly old Playboys with the pictures of naked ingenues razor-bladed out. Several articles were interesting. He put his head against the bars to get the striped light on the pages.

  “B” Section was continuously in an uproar. Conversations were screamed from the fifth to the first tier, usually by means of a relay man. One had to yell to be heard in the next cell. Ron tried to block out the cacaphony and hoped it would quiet down later. He jerked, surprised, when someone ran up to his cell, blocking out the light.

  “Here,” the convict said, putting his hand through the bars and dropping something on the concrete floor. The figure was gone before Ron could see who it was. The “something” was a note wrapped in Scotch tape. Ron disgustedly began ripping the tape off; it was probably a sick proposition from some pervert. He’d already gotten such a note in his regular cell, asking him to tie a towel to the bars if he was interested.

  When he saw it was from Earl, he grinned at his own paranoia. It said:

  Make the D.C.

  read the report out

  loud and plead not

  guilty. Tell Paul I

  signed him up for A.A.

  Ron tore the note to pieces and turned to flush them before he saw the hole where the toilet should have been. He dropped the note into the can, which he held in one hand while he pissed into it. “If they want to fish it out of there, they’re welcome.” He wondered what Earl’s instructions meant. He didn’t bother to relay the rest of the message to Paul. It wasn’t worth fighting the din around him.

  After 10:30 the noise dropped a decibel or two, and from the morass of sound Ron began to recognize certain voices by timber and catch snatches of conversation. Above him, perhaps on the second tier, he picked up a gumboed black voice saying he’d like to kill all white babies, while his listener agreed it was the best way to handle the beasts—before they grew up. A year earlier Ron would have felt compassion for anyone so consumed by hate, and whenever whites casually used “nigger” he was irked. Now he felt tentacles of hate spreading through himself—and half an hour later he smiled when a batch of voices began chanting: “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” The chant drowned out everyone else for ten minutes, and when it finished there was a temporary calm in the storm of sound.

  “Brother James,” a Negro voice called. “Can you hear them white beasts?”

  “Yeah, brother … their time’s comin’.”

  “Your Aunt Jemima mammy’s time is comin’, coon.”

  “Listen to the beast, brother.”

  “He won’t give his name. What’s your name, honky?”

  “Call me Massa, uncle,” the voice said in gross parody of a southern sheriff. It elicited a cluster of white laughter.

  Ron’s fear-filled hate of the nearby black was suddenly overcome by disgust. This was sick. Two hundred men occupied the terraced cells, each cell as identical as the compartments of a honeycomb. Each man was worse off than a beast in a zoo, had less space—yet all these men did was hate and revile others who were equally outcast. Yet he knew he would say nothing, could say nothing, or the whites would tear him apart—and as for helping the blacks, he’d seen a white hippie in the jail be friendly. He’d been beaten and raped. It was an endemic disease, and he was catching it.

  Eventual
ly Ron fell into a troubled sleep, thinking of Pamela, while the voices went on until the wee hours of morning.

  On the floor of “B” Section was a cinder block building that served as an office. The structure had had windows once upon a time, but too much falling glass had caused them to be replaced with sheet metal. The Disciplinary Committee met in the office.

  Ron and Bad Eye stood with a guard outside the door. Paul and Vito, who had already received seven-day sentences, were totally unconcerned as they went back to their cells.

  A voice from within called, “Decker.”

  Ron started to enter, but the guard stopped him and patted him down for weapons. In Soledad a convict had stepped into the Disciplinary Committee, pulled a knife, and dived across the desk to kill a program administrator.

  Three men sat behind a table, solemn as prelates in their cheap, unfashionable suits. On the table sat piled manila folders, each one containing a file. Ron’s name was on the thinnest file of all.

  “Sit down. Decker,” the center man said; his head seemed to grow neckless from his narrow shoulders. It was topped by thin gray hair cut high above the ears. His face was sallow and brown liquid eyes were magnified behind wire-rimmed glasses. A nameplate on his coat pocket said “A. R. Hosspack, Program Administrator,” and he was obviously in charge.

  As Ron edged around to sit gingerly on the straight-backed chair, he smelled cheap cologne. It was especially intense because he’d already become unaccustomed to such smells.

  A black lieutenant beside the program administrator found the right manila folder, opened it, and passed it to the center. The third man was younger, with much longer hair; he had no nameplate.